


Moving Pictures

by Lyrstzha



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Comment Fic, Established Relationship, Flash Fic, M/M, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-21
Updated: 2006-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:38:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On their night off, John—with absolutely no ulterior motives, honest!—brings Rodney some really bad sci-fi to watch. There's lots of ranting, and a few discoveries are made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving Pictures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [panisdead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/panisdead/gifts).



> Written for panisdead's birthday from her prompt: "making out at the movies".

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."—André Malraux

 

John was half-lounging half-sitting on his bed, mostly occupied with cataloguing the slight difference in taste between the skin on Rodney's jawline and the skin behind his ear. There was a sharp flavor just there, at the rising curve of skull, that reminded John somehow of lightning, as if all the electrical firing of synapses in Rodney's brain could actually be tasted on his flesh. A storm bounded somewhat incompletely inside bone, John thought a little dizzily; and if that wasn't Rodney down to the ground, he didn't know what was.

This, of course, was the distraction that caused him to miss what was apparently the worst affront to physics since Galileo's imprisonment.

"Are you _seeing_ this?" Rodney fumed, the hand that wasn't pinned to the bed under John gesturing at the computer screen wildly. "The Earth's core _stopped rotating?_ Seriously? Aristotle would be ashamed of science like this. _Kavanagh_ would be ashamed of science like this."

John gave Rodney's neck a final swipe with his tongue and pulled back a little. In the darkened room, the colored light from the screen flickered across Rodney's face like a kaleidoscope, and John couldn't resist nosing a transitory glowing flash of blue on Rodney's chin before saying, "What, I missed somebody breaking physics again?"

Rodney's head jerked towards John in surprise, his wide eyes still almost as naked as ever, even in the dimness that threw them into shadow against the relief of his cheekbones and brow. "You _missed_ that? How could you miss that? They—" he made a strangled noise and slashed his hand emphatically at the screen as the DVD continued on in peaceful obliviousness. "They have cosmic microwaves being kept at bay by magnetic fields! Apparently the laws of gravity and friction and electromagnetism and thermodynamics are things that only happen to _other_ people. Brain-damaged sea monkeys could find the gaping holes in this hypothesis!" He finally took a breath and snatched a few pieces of popcorn in his free hand as if to hurl them at the screen, but being Rodney, he made a frustrated huffing noise and stuffed them into his mouth instead. He chewed savagely with an aggressive jerk of his chin.

John, still watching Rodney instead of the screen, put on his most guileless voice, and blandly offered, "Hey, it's just a movie, Rodney. You're supposed to suspend disbelief." He kept his impending grin firmly behind his teeth.

Rodney glared at him and stabbed an accusing finger first at John and then at the screen. "Are you kidding me? I'd need the team that built the Golden Gate Bridge to suspend that kind of disbelief! Whatever crack the writers that made this crapfest were on when they wrote this, I can only hope they continued to smoke it long enough to impair their ability to reproduce! I mean, a rotational energy of 385 trillion trillion joules cannot _possibly_ be jump-started by mere 1000 megatons worth of nukes, and that isn't even mentioning the times throughout history that the Earth's magnetic field has collapsed from natural causes without catastrophic side effects. This is the most tragically and pathetically—" he cut off as John's grin escaped slightly from the corner of his mouth in a twitching curve.

John tried to rein it back, and blinked innocently at Rodney. He held out one hand palm-up in a gracious 'go on' sort of motion. "I'm listening. Tragically and pathetically...?"

Rodney's eyes narrowed in suspicious calculation. "You...why exactly did you pick this movie again?"

John tried a little more innocent blinking, and ran a hand through his hair in a motion he privately thought of as his 'oh gosh golly' maneuver. Not that Rodney usually fell for such things anymore, but that was half the fun of this. To play all the same gambits that snowed others and have Rodney read past them effortlessly, simply _knowing_ John better than that—it was part vertiginous terror and part fierce joy. A little like flying, really. "Oh, you know," he finally said casually. "It was labeled sci-fi, and it sounded sort of interesting. I thought you might like it."

Rodney was still watching him with a gleam of keen speculation in his eyes. "Huh. You thought I'd like it."

John nodded. "Absolutely. All that science, after all...," he trailed off, trying to keep a slightly leading tone out of his voice.

Rodney twitched, but choked back whatever he started to reply. "I see," he finally said, in the same tone he used when he was trying to lead his more misfortunate scientists by their noses into the staggering realization of the depths of their own logical fallacies. "So you didn't get it to watch my head explode or anything."

John tried to make his eyes even wider. "Of course not. Why would I want to spend our night off watching your head explode?"

Rodney stared for another moment, then he was suddenly rolling on top of an unresisting John and pressing him back against the bed. His knees fell easily into place straddling John's hips, and his hands rested firmly on either side of John's head. Rodney fixed John's eyes with a searching gaze from only a few inches away. "Because you _like_ it," he murmured in an intense and wondering tone, as if the idea were surprising and maybe a little far-fetched. "You do. You like it when I rant, don't you?"

John stared back, and swallowed audibly. "Nah," he husked finally. "That'd just be weird."

Rodney's eyes narrowed even further. "I cannot believe the sheer asinine incoherence of the idea that an adjacent pile of plutonium would increase the total yield of a nuclear bomb."

John's eyes went a little unfocused and he licked his lips. He tried to press his hips down into the bed slightly, unnoticeably.

Rodney leaned a little closer, and added, "And gravitational pull should _lessen_ as you near the center of the Earth, totally leaving aside the feasibility of getting there in the first place." He punctuated his sentence by grinding his hips down sharply against John's.

John gave a smothered gasp and jerked upwards slightly. He could feel his breath coming faster, and there was no way Rodney could have missed the growing hardness pressed between them.

"Ha!" Rodney crowed triumphantly, grinning. "You do! You totally do! You _like_ it when I rant." Suddenly he stilled, his grin softening until his face wore something like awe. "Except. Um. _Why?_" he whispered.

John shut his eyes and ran his hands slowly up the groove of Rodney's spine from his waist all the way to the top of his neck, finally cupping long fingers over skull-circumscribed tempest. He thought of surfing and flying and storms, but no words came.

After a long moment, John felt the faint stir of Rodney's breath against his eyelashes, and then the feathering of lips against his eyelids. "Yeah, okay," Rodney breathed against his cheekbone, trailing slowly towards his lips, as if he could hear everything John had been thinking. "Next time, bring me _Starship Troopers_," he murmured into John's mouth.


End file.
